My Bologna (Comune di Bologna)

In Italy, there are two towns named after foodstuffs (or was it the other way around?) that I visited on my last trip. Quick, take a guess what they are! Ok, time's up, put your pencils down and read more. In some ways they were very similar, but in my quick first impressions, they couldn't be more different.

The first town was Bologna. As a food, I generally detest bologna, putting it somewhere between 'Spam' and 'Egg Salad'. But names aside, I met a great family from Bologna on the train from Rome. They were an upper middle class husband and wife travelling with a college age daughter and younger son. They commented on my GPS and I struck up a conversation with them, for a while in Italian, but then we switched to English. Being the cosmopolitan people they were, fluency in multiple languages was easy for them.

The Italian lady made her own sculptures which she showed me on her cell phone and I showed her some of mine which she graciously complimented. The husband was busy at first talking with his daughter who was just recently engaged to be married, yet you could still see he considered her his little girl because their family was super close.

Over the trip, we all talked Italian and US politics, art, business and what it was like to live around Bologna. And, that was before I even arrived in the city. By the time we were all there, I had made genuine friends with like minded people and was actually a bit sad to say goodbye. The city was clean, historic, and home to professionals and the affluent. As a generalization, it seems like people in the North are more career oriented and strive for a really high standard of living.

Bologna has been known for its superior universities and as knowledge center since the middle ages. Maybe long enough for all the smartest people's genes to have amassed more concentratedly in one location. Needless to say, I really enjoyed my time around the city of Bologna.

The other food named town, (Did you guess Pisa? It's not the same as Pizza...) was Parma, as in 'parmesan cheese' and 'parma ham'. At this point, I have to mention that I consider parma ham extremely gross as it is uncooked.

I'd been driving for quite a while on the highway after killing a large apple juice and bottled water in Milan. I arrived around Parma by car on Sunday afternoon on my way to Firenza, and had to go to the WC so bad my berries were about to fall off. So instead of going to an 'Automat', I pulled off the A1 and headed to the city center of Parma over by the museum (of course). I parked in the awesome parking garage and didn't find a public restroom there. So I headed in the direction of the museum. Walked up the stairs, but they were closed, on a Sunday afternoon. At 2:00pm...

Ok, so I thought it can't be that hard to find an open restaurant to order whatever so I could use the toilet. Well, it *was* that hard. I walked across the courtyard of the museum and down *several* long city blocks before I could find anything at all open. Along the way, there were sandwich counters and a few other things which had absolutely no restrooms. I must have painfully walked 2 miles in ever-widening circles like a Coast Guard pilot looking for a capsize accident survivor before I finally found a restaurant with the qualifications for which I was looking.

For this reason, I will forever have an unfair bias against the city of Parma and their evil 'shut everything down at 2:00 pm' ways. Where food named towns are concerned, I'll always go to the city historically more friendly, that is, to my Bologna.

Another Reason Why the U.S. Postal Service Is Lame (Il Servizio Postale è Male)

Today, I found myself needing to mail a letter at the big post office downtown in Dallas. I was ordering some glass pieces for more mosaic work, but needed to send some light samples in the envelope for color matching purposes.

With stamped letter in hand, I walked across the street to the large neoclassical building. The building itself is very impressive, and the classical influences are everywhere. From the thick marble slab covered walls (cippolino green and white I think), to the frescoed ceilings, it's how I would build a post office. Notice how even the grate in the photo below has the window pattern of the Curia Julia (ancient Roman senate house)?

Even the lamp post footings outside are inspired by furniture thousands of years old.

Instead of just dropping the letter in the slot for mailing, I wanted to get a weighing to make sure there was enough postage. Since I didn't have an extra stamp just to stick on there, I decided to wait in the short line since there are no more stamp machines. Things were moving along as the postal worker would say 'next please' after each quickly served customer. But at few people before my turn, a customer with a big shipping request delayed the guy at the window.

People behind me seemed like they were in a hurry, so I walked up to the window before the worker called out 'next please'. I think this filled the guy with an irrational rage, the likes of which in lies the phrase 'going postal'. He started counting money and doing other clerical work behind the counter as the line of customers continued to grow. Waiting patiently, I thought 'Ok, I will play your little game.' So out comes my phone, annnnd I'm browsing.

Well at this point some of the other people in line are getting very agitated, so they open a second window. Of course, by this point, I don't want to just walk over in front of the person behind me who has also been waiting for a long time.

Unbelievably, the guy continues to do other tasks without looking up, I can tell he's teaching me a lesson. He was also teaching everyone else in line what government bureaucracy is all about, and how things will be worse with more of it. The manager even walked over to the guy behind the counter and asked if he was ok!

Fifteen minutes later, he takes a personal phone call and walks away from the window... I had just finished reading one of Gwen's blog posts, so the next lady in line for the one functional postal employee offers to let me go first. He blinked first, I won! I think.

I hope that with government healthcare, I never have to wait at the window for an MRI or surgery or something. If I do, I'll wait for the guy at the window to fully say 'Next Please'.

Also, the irony is not lost on me that by the standards of some other countries I would like to live in, this is not a terrible bureaucracy (think utility companies in Italy). But, if we are becoming as bureaucratic as those nations, I would rather live and work around ancient history and beautiful scenery...

Books About Ancient Water and Disaster (Libri di Acqua Antichi e Disastri)

I've just finished reading a book called Pompeii by Robert Harris. Not *just* now, it's not like the book is still in my hand as I'm setting it down while typing this.The book was an imaginative story set in ancient Italy in the days immediately before the eruption of Vesuvius. It was extraordinarily well researched, and even though I caught two historical mistakes, the presentation of the story was very novel. Whoa is that why they call those things 'novels'?

It followed an hour by hour timeline interwoven with documented historical events from the era, which as you can imagine for me was a good read.I won't give away plot points, but there is a strong chance in this book that the volcano erupts at the end.

The main character of the story was a maintenance engineer assigned to work on the various aqueducts around the bay of Naples. I know a few things about the aqueducts, having spent some time around Pont du Gard just north of Nimes, France.


Here are some photos I took of the famous above ground part of the aqueduct. Most all of the aqueducts were below ground, except for these grand bridgey parts. The whole area around there is great, you can kayak on the river (great fun, I highly recommend Kayak Vert for both this place and Fontaine de Vaucluse) and the natural marble outcroppings are fantastic to look at.
Notice the huge shadow the 160 foot tall aqueduct casts on the river?












You can see the flow chanel for the water here, look at all the sediment buildup on the floor. I wonder in ancient Romans had 'Evian'(tm) as an alternative?


















As a quick digression about the area around Pont du Gard, did you know that the town of Nimes is the namesake of the mythological 'Nemesis'? A Greek goddess who personified vengeful fate against mortals who were excessively arrogant or tried to achieve too much. Hubris / blind ambition was apparently not appreciated back then, especially by the Roman generals who retired here and patronized the Nemesis temple. Maybe their patronage was motivated by a desire to keep people below them in line?

When Gravity and Marble Don't Mix (Quando la Gravità e Marmi Fatto Problemi)

Last week, I had a delivery firm move my tile from the freight terminal to my residence, what some insiders of the industry refer to as 'Residential' delivery.

The truck operator had some trouble understanding the driving directions I gave over the phone, and that should have served as warning that this wasn't a top notch crack team of delivery specialists. The driver's obnoxious nervous hyena laugh and constant grabbing his lower back and muttering should have been the second and third indicators, respectively. I deduced that if he was not in the delivery business, he'd be a parking lot attendant's assistant or maybe a dog thief.

After the truck pulled up and the driver lowered the hydraulic lift on the back of the truck, we went aboard so I could count the boxes. The shipment was high quality Crema Marfil tile from Spain on four crates. All the boxes were accounted for and on a random sampling, it appeared to be very high quality unflawed material. Perfect.

Well, then the driver said 'Ok, let's get this tile off the truck' and that was precisely when the fun started. He couldn't get a manual forklift underneath the crates to move them to the liftgate, so he had to push slats of wood underneath the barely propped up crate, readjust the manual forklift, then finally get the crate on the lift. The first crate was successfully lowered to the ground and I happily began transfering the tile to a wheeled dolly and rolling it up to where it was to be stored. I think I was even whistling a jaunty tune, jauntily.

But then the second crate was placed on the manual forklift, the son of a goat kissing driver rolled that f'er right off the end of the liftgate onto the street. I was immediately and emphatically somewhat disappointed.














Perhaps I might have yelled out some expletives? I went inside to check with my lawyer and the guy who sold me the stone about what the hell to do when residential delivery gets personal like it just did. They advised noting on the bill of lading that the freight company dropped the tile, so I did that in ALL CAPS, so years from now, they could have a chuckle about how steamed I was.

The driver, understandably, felt bad. He called his dispatcher who indicated that we needed to go through each and every tile box to determine the damage. *more yelling*

But it actually wasn't as bad as it all looked. Only about 120 sqft of tile was destroyed, but there were however two more crates on the truck. The driver offered to offload them right then, but given his somewhat tarnished 50% success rate, I decided to wait and mull over the situation. Plus, I had to go to the Mavericks / Kings basketball game in an hour and it was starting to get dark, so I just told him to bring it back the following week.

Greece in the Frying Pan (Guai a Caldo di Grecia)

I like Greece, sunny, usually friendly people for the most part, the birthplace of actual democracy and Olympic games. Nothing like a bit of retsina in the evening on a rooftop patio in my favorite section of The Plaka, but now there is a little bit of trouble. They spent more than they should have and the amount of their debt is supposed to be 20% bigger than all the goods and services they produce for a whole year. That would be like some people owing 1.2 million dollars.

Here is a photo I took on a boat off the Ia side of the Greek island of Thera which captured the intense reds of the sunset there. It reminds me of the money that the Greek government and bankers who allowed them to get in over their heads are hemorrhaging.

Oh, but back to the problem at hand... In a sense, Greece is dragging down the Eurozone with them too. That's kind of the issue which crops up when one doesn't keep international trade at arms length and comingles current accounts of nations.

Well fear not, I have an idea! We can just divy up and sell off the antiquities of Greece to the highest bidders. I'm almost certain that the UK would love to have the rest of the Parthenon in downtown London to go with the Elgin Marbles which already reside in their museum.

Me, I just want a couple of caryatides from Athens to build a pool bath / marble cabana with. What would you guys bid on?

The Rare, Beautiful, and Expensive at Ponte Vecchio

In the Florence, there is an ultra touristy spot on the river Arno called Ponte Vecchio, or 'old bridge'. In its current form, it was supposedly finished in 1345, but a bridge had been there since Roman times. Here is a picture I took of it from the Uffizi museum.

On and along this bridge might be one of the highest concentration of expensive jewelry stores in all of Italy or the world for that matter, but on that mild October day, I was only interested in one kind of shop.





No, not a coffee shop, that would be later. The shops that held my interest sold pietre dure, also known as Florentine mosaic. If you are unfamiliar, pietre dure is stone art where the pieces are 'jigsaw' cut by hand with a little diamond bow lubricated with wax and special mud for extreme precision in fitting the pieces together. Some of the works look as fine as any painting because of the level of intricacy and careful gradation of color.

In one of the shops, I spotted what I was after. A modern table top utilizing an extrordinarily rare green stone used for palaces and noble residences in Roman times, lapis Lacedaemonius often erroneously called 'green porphyry' or 'serpentine'. I want to reconstruct a small part of the Roman senate floor using authentic materials, and this is the stuff I'm missing.

I talked with the sales lady and showed her some of my work and mentioned I'd be interested in buying any raw materials they could spare at double their cost. The lady seemed enthusiastic and took me to meet the owner at a different shop on down from the bridge.

The lady owner / manager of the shop conversed with the sales lady for a few moments (I couldn't speak Mandarin and she looked kind of mean besides), and the sales lady returned and told me that the materials I was interested in were not available at any price. Then she shrugged and pointed out that I could purchase the table top and break it up for the material.
Destroying 11,000 Euro worth of perfectly good pietre dure art to get a few square inches of a pretty stone didn't seem like a good idea, so I thanked the nice sales lady and went on my way.

Note to the annoying shop owner in Florence: I obtained some of this material and have a contact in Rome to get more. Deal with it...

Artist Statement (Esposizione di Artista)

I was considering a recent question posed in a secret society website of mosaic artists of which I'm a member. The question was about the kind of typical marketing blurb you read when you go to a gallery and read about an artist whose work you are considering buying, and what if anything should be in it.



Many times, the artists throw in technical jargon that the average gallery patron won't understand. They also spend too much time comparing themselves to other artists that are maybe known a bit better. Or maybe they are a bit timid and don't sell / represent themselves well enough.


I thought I would put together a comprehensive artist statement to guide my own works; as much as to set goals and expectations as to advertise the quality of my works. I didn't want the statement to be flawed in any of the ways listed above.



So tell me what you think of my first draft here of an 'artist statement': (the mosaic group seemed to think it was spot on)

I strive to use all available methodologies and technologies of art to make unparalleled creations which will appeal to the very widest range of viewers imaginable. Even technologies that do not exist yet are effortlessly applied in the most creative manner possible with perfect efficiency of form and design. This will allow for the most lucarative and prestigious placements of my works, furthering my schemes of ubiquitous placement, licensing, and spinoffs / derivative works meticulously copied by slavish followers and carried forward for all of time.
In many cases, entire histories of civilizations will be rewritten to accomodate the grandness of my works. People will weep openly upon observing these unique creations, and other master artists will be obsessively plagued with burning questions such as 'Why couldn't I have made that?' The ultimate goal of the art is, of course, total world domination and complete mastery of everything and everyone throughout eternity.